1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the generation of advertisements for display on electronic devices.
2. Background
According to one definition, advertising is a paid, one-way communication through a medium in which an advertiser is identified, and the message (i.e., the advertisement) provided by the advertiser is controlled. Advertising may be performed for a variety of purposes, including publicity, public relations, product placement, sponsorship, underwriting, and sales promotion. A variety of mediums are used to convey an advertisement, including television, radio, movies, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and billboards.
Online advertising relates to the promoting of products and services using the Internet and World Wide Web. Typical online advertisement types include banner ads, floating ads, pop-up ads, and video ads which are provided through a browser to the user's computer desktop. Dynamic data driven online advertisements, such as Yahoo! Smart Ads, are becoming increasing popular. These types of ads provide one-to-one targeting between advertiser and user by customizing an advertising message to contextual parameters, such as user interests and user location. Dynamic data driven ads can perform significantly better than static advertisements, which are not customizable.
A challenge to dynamic data driven ads is their complexity. The building of a dynamic data driven ad typically requires complex programming to be performed. A dynamic data driven ad can typically only be built by persons (e.g., engineers) having a medium to high level of skill in computer front-end technologies such as Adobe® FLASH® and ActionScript™, both of which are published by Adobe Systems, Inc., headquartered in San Jose, Calif. Advertisement agencies and creative agencies, which frequently build the “creative” portion of an advertisement for advertising customers, often employ creative designers. Creative designers typically focus on the look-and-feel of an advertisement, and typically lack an advanced level of programming skill. As a result, creative designers frequently are unable to develop dynamic data driven ads, which impedes the overall process of building and trafficking dynamic data driven ads, and increases the cost and time required to run such campaigns. Thus, what is desired are more efficient ways of generating dynamic data driven ads.